Eliot Spitzer's Problem--and Ours

This morning, Barney Frank was on a number of television shows in advance of hearings he's holding on municipal bond insurance. The Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee was asked about Eliot Spitzer in light of his own involvement with a male prostitute nearly 20 years ago.

At the time, Frank, a rising star in the Democratic party and a closeted congressman from Massachusetts, was discovered to have used the services of a male prostitute who he befriended. Frank declined to comment on Spitzer's woes.

The rest of the world has a lot to say, of course, and the story line is pretty familiar: Arrogant jerk gets his comeuppance. Poor Silda, a reference to the latest beleaguered wife. What a fall from power. Hillary Clinton loses a superdelegate.

Spitzer's fall is also a comment on the rest of us and our confusion about sexual mores. What Spitzer did was certainly illegal and so it was more than just a question of indiscretion. It was more than a private matter, as he said.

But it was, at heart, a private matter. It was his bad luck that this case drew the FBI while most johns solicit prostitutes without a surveillance team on them.

But what do you say about a country where Larry Craig is still in the Senate but Eliot Spitzer is resigning and where David Vitter has not even been sanctioned?

Bill Clinton was the second president to be impeached for lying -- in his case, about an affair with an White House intern -- and somehow muddled through.

The moral arithmetic of all of this is perplexing, at best, which shouldn't be surprising in a nation where marital affairs are common, pornography is devoured, and sex infuses most popular entertainment.

Sexual confusion isn't unique to America. Even the French seem to have reached their limit with the whirlwind courtship and marriage of their president, Nicholas Sarkozy, to former model Carla Bruni.

I guess what I'm saying is that it's easy to point and laugh at Spitzer except in some ways he's not that unique.

Yes, his spectacularly bad judgment is surely comical. My favorite joke so far is that his bringing a New York prostitute to Washington shows a certain Gotham arrogance. The restaurants aren't as good. The theater is nonexistent and, thank you, I'll put my own hooker on Amtrak. I also like that he didn't put her on an Acela. Was part of his risky sex making her stop in New Carrolton, Maryland, and Metro Park, New Jersey?

Spitzer, who for all his arrogance, did much good is a tragic, comic figure. But the rest of us are indicted in this, too.

On the same Tuesday he stayed locked in his Fifth Avenue apartment contemplating the resignation that is coming today, a report was publicized showing that a fourth of young women have some kind of sexually transmitted disease.

This is a nation that has any number of sexual issues and hangups and while we all guffaw or are saddened by the spectacle of Spitzer, today might be a good time for a little collective introspection as well.